[Pkg-mozext-maintainers] BoF or Sprint while DebCamp or DebConf?

Dmitry Smirnov onlyjob at debian.org
Wed Jul 25 18:28:56 BST 2018


On Wednesday, 25 July 2018 11:15:10 PM AEST Carsten Schoenert wrote:
> I hope I can get the final Thunderbird 60.0 version from Mozilla within
> this week (depends on their releasing) and prepare also a final upload
> to experimental of this version also this week so we can all test this
> version within some extension in question.

Nice. I hope to see it in "unstable" soon.


> * Where should be the packaged AddOns be collected on Salsa?
> We have 'pkg-mozext-team' and also 'webext-team' [2]. The latter has now
> most of the git trees.

Separation looks clear (enough) to me: "webext-team" is a place for new 
WebExtensions while the other "pkg-mozext-team" is for legacy XUL-only 
extensions.


> * How to package Mozilla AddOns for Debian in recent days?
> Out there are mozilla-devscripts but also "manual" packaging for
> packages named 'webext-$foo'. Could this be consolidated aka make the
> packaging easier?

I think I have some answers as I happened to be working on some extensions in 
the last few days and I think I've figured out how to package them.
I'll try to write it on wiki somewhere but to cut the long story short, 
manual method is easier as "dh_webext" is immature and offers little to be 
useful.

Basically web extensions can be installed into "/usr/share/webext" and 
enabled in chromium with "/etc/chromium.d" file as found in Stylus package:

  https://salsa.debian.org/webext-team/stylus

This is not ideal and I'd much rather prefer to symlink into chromium's 
extensions folder but it looks like no such method is available.

Activating web-extension in Firefox is much more difficult: one _can_ symlink 
extension directory into "/usr/share/mozilla/extensions/{ec8030f7-
c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}" with a name as per "applications.gecko.id" 
value from "manifest.json" but Firefox caches extensions under XDG_CACHE_HOME 
and not checking for updates so any extension package upgrade is ignored.
This can be fixed by symlinking zipped extension bundle which appears to be 
supported method of sideloading but even then it might be necessary to reload 
extensions page...

More examples of Firefox-only extensions can be found in "form-history-
control", "lightbeam" and "tree-style-tab" repositories.


> * What about the wiki site for Mozilla extensions? [4]

Perhaps we need a new page focusing on WebExtensions.


> How can the wiki site made more attractive and a central point for
> packaging related questions?

Up-to-date information is crucial... But how to keep it up-to-date that is 
the question...

-- 
All the best,
 Dmitry Smirnov.

---

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything
else is public relations.
        -- George Orwell
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